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Representations of childcare in the Australian print media: An exploratory corpus-assisted discourse analysis

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Abstract

While an increasing body of Australian and international research has explored the relationship between media and education, few studies have examined this relationship in the context of early childhood education. This paper contributes to this research gap by reporting on a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of how childcare is represented in 801 newspaper texts from six Australian newspapers. As a foundational paper of a broader study investigating public and political influences on parents’ childcare choices, the paper details the use and utility of corpus linguistic tools for exploring the discourse construction of childcare in a large corpus of media texts. It also highlights the value of analysing media corpora via media ownership, focusing on the two dominant Australian media organisations, Fairfax and News Corp. Analyses reveal similarities but also key differences in the representation of childcare in Fairfax and News Corp newspapers. In Australia, print media still sets the daily media agenda and reflects the dominant discourse constructions surrounding major public issues. Accordingly, the beliefs, practices and decision-making of current and potential parent users of formal childcare may be differentially influenced depending not just on their (direct or indirect) access to print media, but by the format (tabloid or broadsheet) and thus ownership (Fairfax or News Corp).

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Notes

  1. A significance value of p < 0.001 denotes that there is less than a 1 in a 1000 chance that the difference in a word's frequency in the focal corpus relative to the reference corpus is merely a chance occurrence, so the word’s use can safely be taken to characterise and differentiate the discourse of the focus corpus relative to that of the comparator.

  2. A significance level of p < 0.05 (i.e. a less than a 1 in 20 chance of a difference being random) is typically taken as a minimum threshold for statistical significance. Anything greater than a probability of 0.05 is NOT statistically significant. Here the point is that we are looking for those words and phrases the frequencies of which do not even reach the threshold for significance when the two media sub-corpora are compared to one another. We use this as one of the metrics of ‘sharedness’: words and phrases that are shared are frequent in the total corpus and evenly distributed across the two media sub-corpora (to the point of NOT being keywords at the minimum acceptable level for significance in the cross-comparison).

  3. The BNC is ‘a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross‐section of current British English, both spoken and written’ (Burnard 2009). Since no similar large, balanced reference corpus currently exists for Australian English, we deemed it appropriate to use the BNC. The written spelling and grammar of Australian English is much closer to that of British English than, say, American English. Moreover, since our aim is to identify the textual fingerprints of childcare-related newspaper articles as a body of texts, the only danger of comparison against the BNC is that it will also throw up Australia-specific dialectal differences and proper names in addition to the material we are most interested in.

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Acknowledgements

This research was undertaken as part of ARC Linkage project LP130100129, supported financially and in-kind by Goodstart Early Learning and KU Children’s Services. We acknowledge the constructive feedback provided by one reviewer, and the invaluable research assistance undertaken by Susan Maidment and Suzanne Egan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Marianne Fenech

  2. Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    David P. Wilkins

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  1. Marianne Fenech
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Correspondence to Marianne Fenech.

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Fenech, M., Wilkins, D.P. Representations of childcare in the Australian print media: An exploratory corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Aust. Educ. Res. 44, 161–190 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-016-0225-4

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